8 ms·

The Linux Talent Draft is On

61 points by Tsiolkovsky 14y ago

dkhenry 14y ago
Furthermore, As someone who has been hiring every skilled developer I can come across for three years, I have found that good linux skills are one of the best markers of good development skills. There is something about people who aren't afraid to , and even enjoy , using linux that corresponds with an aptitude with programming, this is especially true of back end developers.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Familiarity with Linux means people know the basics of UNIX, which is essential if you're doing anything on the web these days.
  - strangetimes 14y ago
    Don't tell .NET developers that.
- dsirijus 14y ago
  Also, though I have no sources on this other than personal experience, linux skills are frequently indicator of heavy prorastinator.
  - Craiggybear 14y ago
    > "Also, though I have no sources on this other than personal experience, linux skills are frequently indicator of heavy prorastinator." What on Earth are you talking about?
  - davidmr 14y ago
    That's a curious association I've never made. Can you say a bit more about that?
    - praptak 14y ago
      What draws people to Linux is the possibility of tinkering. It's not like tinkerers are always procrastinators but they prefer tasks that engage their "tinkerer sense": trying out a new API or maybe doing something unusual with an old one. Doing something mundane with a known API is something they will avoid. Such tasks are probably in the majority of those found even in the most exciting jobs. This is what I believe to be the cause of the association. Source: generalizing my own experience to the whole population of Earth. Btw, I gotta get back to work too.
    - dsirijus 14y ago
      Well, where there's much to play with, you end up playing much. I frequently find myself playing in my .vimrc, .screenrc, .bashrc and other confs to not much obvious productive output. Changing window managers, console terminals and anything basically, all in excuse of not working on job at hand. On the upper hand, beats playing solitaire.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    Realizes he's had a Clojure REPL open for days untouched. I have no idea what you're talking about. EDIT: Six minutes later sees this post and realizes he STILL hasn't gotten back to what he was working on.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    Procrastination means absolutely nothing if there is good output. If you are not on the floor of some factory sweatshop, it isn't necessary to have continuous even output. Procrastination can be managed. One can procrastinate on one task by carrying out another. If I do not work for an hour and then make the perfect change, that's better than floundering for six hours.
    - dsirijus 14y ago
      Usually, when I do feel like not working on what I need to be working atm, I work on something else I DO feel like working on. Even when it costs me a deadline miss, I end up with something tangible in the end. That's my best yet strategy against procrastination.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        You are not alone. Consider the art of structured procrastination: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
      - nicholassmith 14y ago
        I always find the work you do that you are interested in usually has implications for the work you don't want to do, positive implications usually.
  - polynomial 14y ago
    That's not procrastination, that's push-back. ;-)
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    The three virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Thanks to Larry Wall.
- ntkachov 14y ago
  While this may be true it is important to note that the corollary is not necessarily true. That is to say, not having good linux skills doesn't make you bad developer. I've found plenty of people who don't know linux very well and are fantastic developers. Personally, I'm having trouble living without grep (work is easier on a windows machine).
  - sciurus 14y ago
    I'm sure you know, but there are many ways to get GNU grep or similar programs running on Windows. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87350/what-are-good-grep-tool-for-windows http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87350/what-are-good-grep-...
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      Sure, there are ways to get various Linux-like tools on Windows, or Mac. But inevitably -- and I've been using Windows offerings since the mid 1990s and Mac for the past 6-7 years -- these are nowhere near as complete as what you'll find in native Linux, they're missing key bits, polish and bugs are less than optimal, host integration isn't what it is in Linux, host features lack key Linux bits (especially /proc and /sys, and all that they enable), and if you want full coverage, you'll almost always end up with several different toolsets none of which offer quite what I'm looking for. And you're missing soup-to-nuts, all-encompassing, sane, bug-reporting-integrated package management. On other systems, I manage bits of my Linux-like environment through better or worse (Cygwin -- don't get me started -- but look at apt-cygwin) package management. But most of my OS is outside of that. Inside Debian, I might manage a very small handful of non-packaged software items, mostly browser plugins. Oh, and lately Ruby gems, which are their own brand of hell, but whatever. I first switched to Linux when I realized that I was spending more and more of my time trying to make Windows NT look like what I got out of the box with a $30 Linux distro CD (bundled with a book). Other than a few distro hops (last to Debian, in the late 1990s, though I continue to evaluate / work with others), I've never looked back.
  - AkThhhpppt 14y ago
    What's preventing you running a VM to let you use it (and all the other helpful bits)?
- wyclif 14y ago
  What's missing in this thread is a description of what kinds of Linux jobs are going unfilled. I'm genuinely curious to know what the landscape looks like.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    When I was hired for my job in information security, Linux skills weren't required or even spoken about. After I started, I automated some of my work with shell scripts and wrote other shell scripts to clean up my data for me. Now any new employee that comes in will see "Linux shell scripting recommended" on the application. "Linux jobs" might be rare, but jobs where Linux skill comes in handy are abundant.
  - jacobquick 14y ago
    Senior linux system administrators are in very short supply. Companies have given up training people for that kind of work, schools don't teach it, and most of my sysadmin friends migrated to management or dev over the past few years. I've been looking around for a new gig in San Francisco (not south bay) the past month and sometimes it feels like I'm the only candidate and there's all these companies that can't find people. It's nice feeling wanted but I won't do the work of five guys by myself and be the only one on call for years at a stretch, something will have to change soon. I wish Google would adopt that Lee Iacocca philosophy of training people specifically to spread their way of doing things across the industry, at least there'd be competent mid-levels around then, but they just churn those people on 1 year contracts like everyone else.
- Jabbles 14y ago
  Do you mean bash/shell skills, familiarity with unix tools like grep? Or that deep understanding of an operating system is useful knowledge for a programmer?
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    It sounds like he is talking about the former.
- 1337p337 14y ago
  Of course. If you love programming, an OS whose primary interface is a programmable shell is going to be very appealing. On top of that, the large number of small programming languages that come with typical installs of the OS (awk, sed, dc, bc, sh) make Linux a very comfortable place for programmers.
dmm 14y ago
> Eighty-one percent of the hiring managers surveyed for the report said that hiring Linux talent this year is a priority. What is "Linux" in this context? Are they talking about doing actual kernel development or clicking around Gnome and using the GCC stack?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  I assume they mean the typical Linux userland stack.
davidmr 14y ago
> But 85 percent said finding Linux talent is difficult. I couldn't agree more with this statement. I work in Chicago--which you think would have a rather large pool of Linux talent--but it's incredibly hard to find really top-notch Linux people at any price. Like any technical job, there's no shortage of candidates that have "Linux System Administrator" on their CVs, but five minutes into a phone screen you can tell that nearly all of them are what I like to call "application drivers". They've been paid well to sit in front of an application GUI (vmware, backups, storage, etc.) for 10 years and push buttons. It's astounding to me that it's so hard to find people who can do the most basic things: build packages in the OS native format from source; write complicated shell scripts; write complicated applications in (python|perl|ruby); debug and port C/C++ programs; etc. In my last job (Dept. of Energy lab), I used to think it was hard to find people because the pay wasn't good enough, but in my current gig in the financial industry, we're willing to pay basically whatever it takes to get the best talent, but the pool of great candidates is very, very small. I think part of it is that in a shaky economy, the best people don't get laid off and they're hunkering down, unwilling to risk taking a new job, but I don't really know.
- waynemr 14y ago
  If they have all of that money for hiring qualified Linux talent, but they are unable to find it readily... why don't they start an apprenticeship style program? I know in the highly regulated nuclear operator field, companies setup schools, where students are paid to attend classes and if they can get their license, they have a paid position waiting. Why not something similar for Linux professionals? I have been in IT for nearly 20 years and it is downright shameful how companies these days are willing to claim they will pay whatever it takes to get IT talent that doesn't actually exist, but would rather shoot themselves in the face before investing in training.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    They will pay whatever it takes* to get IT talent that does actually exist, at other companies.
  - droithomme 14y ago
jamesmcn 14y ago
This seems like a consequence of the rise of cloud computing. My experience is probably biased by the fact that I've been working in the Seattle area for most of the last decade. I've worked with and hired excellent engineers with Linux backgrounds and also Windows backgrounds. Elsewhere it may be harder to find top Windows devs. In the '90s, developers built their own Linux desktops and servers because there wasn't any IT infrastructure capable of supporting us. After the dot com crash and the nearly simultaneous death of big-iron Unix, Linux IT support started to become a thing. Medium and large companies staffed up on Linux sysadmins and support staff, so it was possible for devs to just code and remain fairly ignorant of the underlying OS - or at least confine their knowledge to the theoretical domain. Now that you can just spin up server resources in the cloud, I can see devs with Linux experience having an edge over those without.
- stock_toaster 14y ago
  > This seems like a consequence of the rise of cloud computing Could also be due to the rise of 'devops'. I see a fair number of places simply choosing to not hire (some I imagine may be having trouble hiring too) enough sysadmin staff, and instead just having developers do double duty and calling it 'devops'.
daniel_solano 14y ago
I wonder if it would make sense for companies looking for Linux talent to somehow target users of less 'user-friendly' distributions such as Gentoo or Arch. I don't know how well it would work, but I imagine that advertising on a project web page or, if allowed, making an announcement to a user's mailing list could be a way to find developers.
zheng 14y ago
This article is very ambiguous on what kind of linux talent they see as being needed. Are they looking for sysadmins or developers? By linux do they mean using tools like gcc, make, etc? Or do they mean writing tools against a POSIX interface? Also, considering that basically every college uses a linux environment, I find it odd that they can't find devs who can work in linux.
- anon987 14y ago
  I believe it's both. Linux continues to grow so organizations need more admins to support more servers as well as more developers to write applications, scripts, and programs that run on those servers. I don't see a glut of talent in either case.

61 points by Tsiolkovsky 14y ago

Furthermore, As someone who has been hiring every skilled developer I can come across for three years, I have found that good linux skills are one of the best markers of good development skills. There is something about people who aren't afraid to , and even enjoy , using linux that corresponds with an aptitude with programming, this is especially true of back end developers.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Familiarity with Linux means people know the basics of UNIX, which is essential if you're doing anything on the web these days.
- strangetimes 14y ago
  Don't tell .NET developers that.
dsirijus 14y ago
Also, though I have no sources on this other than personal experience, linux skills are frequently indicator of heavy prorastinator.
- Craiggybear 14y ago
  > "Also, though I have no sources on this other than personal experience, linux skills are frequently indicator of heavy prorastinator." What on Earth are you talking about?
- davidmr 14y ago
  That's a curious association I've never made. Can you say a bit more about that?
  - praptak 14y ago
    What draws people to Linux is the possibility of tinkering. It's not like tinkerers are always procrastinators but they prefer tasks that engage their "tinkerer sense": trying out a new API or maybe doing something unusual with an old one. Doing something mundane with a known API is something they will avoid. Such tasks are probably in the majority of those found even in the most exciting jobs. This is what I believe to be the cause of the association. Source: generalizing my own experience to the whole population of Earth. Btw, I gotta get back to work too.
  - dsirijus 14y ago
    Well, where there's much to play with, you end up playing much. I frequently find myself playing in my .vimrc, .screenrc, .bashrc and other confs to not much obvious productive output. Changing window managers, console terminals and anything basically, all in excuse of not working on job at hand. On the upper hand, beats playing solitaire.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Realizes he's had a Clojure REPL open for days untouched. I have no idea what you're talking about. EDIT: Six minutes later sees this post and realizes he STILL hasn't gotten back to what he was working on.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  Procrastination means absolutely nothing if there is good output. If you are not on the floor of some factory sweatshop, it isn't necessary to have continuous even output. Procrastination can be managed. One can procrastinate on one task by carrying out another. If I do not work for an hour and then make the perfect change, that's better than floundering for six hours.
  - dsirijus 14y ago
    Usually, when I do feel like not working on what I need to be working atm, I work on something else I DO feel like working on. Even when it costs me a deadline miss, I end up with something tangible in the end. That's my best yet strategy against procrastination.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      You are not alone. Consider the art of structured procrastination: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
    - nicholassmith 14y ago
      I always find the work you do that you are interested in usually has implications for the work you don't want to do, positive implications usually.
- polynomial 14y ago
  That's not procrastination, that's push-back. ;-)
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  The three virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Thanks to Larry Wall.
ntkachov 14y ago
While this may be true it is important to note that the corollary is not necessarily true. That is to say, not having good linux skills doesn't make you bad developer. I've found plenty of people who don't know linux very well and are fantastic developers. Personally, I'm having trouble living without grep (work is easier on a windows machine).
- sciurus 14y ago
  I'm sure you know, but there are many ways to get GNU grep or similar programs running on Windows. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87350/what-are-good-grep-tool-for-windows http://stackoverflow.com/questions/87350/what-are-good-grep-...
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Sure, there are ways to get various Linux-like tools on Windows, or Mac. But inevitably -- and I've been using Windows offerings since the mid 1990s and Mac for the past 6-7 years -- these are nowhere near as complete as what you'll find in native Linux, they're missing key bits, polish and bugs are less than optimal, host integration isn't what it is in Linux, host features lack key Linux bits (especially /proc and /sys, and all that they enable), and if you want full coverage, you'll almost always end up with several different toolsets none of which offer quite what I'm looking for. And you're missing soup-to-nuts, all-encompassing, sane, bug-reporting-integrated package management. On other systems, I manage bits of my Linux-like environment through better or worse (Cygwin -- don't get me started -- but look at apt-cygwin) package management. But most of my OS is outside of that. Inside Debian, I might manage a very small handful of non-packaged software items, mostly browser plugins. Oh, and lately Ruby gems, which are their own brand of hell, but whatever. I first switched to Linux when I realized that I was spending more and more of my time trying to make Windows NT look like what I got out of the box with a $30 Linux distro CD (bundled with a book). Other than a few distro hops (last to Debian, in the late 1990s, though I continue to evaluate / work with others), I've never looked back.
- AkThhhpppt 14y ago
  What's preventing you running a VM to let you use it (and all the other helpful bits)?
wyclif 14y ago
What's missing in this thread is a description of what kinds of Linux jobs are going unfilled. I'm genuinely curious to know what the landscape looks like.
- freehunter 14y ago
  When I was hired for my job in information security, Linux skills weren't required or even spoken about. After I started, I automated some of my work with shell scripts and wrote other shell scripts to clean up my data for me. Now any new employee that comes in will see "Linux shell scripting recommended" on the application. "Linux jobs" might be rare, but jobs where Linux skill comes in handy are abundant.
- jacobquick 14y ago
  Senior linux system administrators are in very short supply. Companies have given up training people for that kind of work, schools don't teach it, and most of my sysadmin friends migrated to management or dev over the past few years. I've been looking around for a new gig in San Francisco (not south bay) the past month and sometimes it feels like I'm the only candidate and there's all these companies that can't find people. It's nice feeling wanted but I won't do the work of five guys by myself and be the only one on call for years at a stretch, something will have to change soon. I wish Google would adopt that Lee Iacocca philosophy of training people specifically to spread their way of doing things across the industry, at least there'd be competent mid-levels around then, but they just churn those people on 1 year contracts like everyone else.
Jabbles 14y ago
Do you mean bash/shell skills, familiarity with unix tools like grep? Or that deep understanding of an operating system is useful knowledge for a programmer?
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  It sounds like he is talking about the former.
1337p337 14y ago
Of course. If you love programming, an OS whose primary interface is a programmable shell is going to be very appealing. On top of that, the large number of small programming languages that come with typical installs of the OS (awk, sed, dc, bc, sh) make Linux a very comfortable place for programmers.

dmm 14y ago

> Eighty-one percent of the hiring managers surveyed for the report said that hiring Linux talent this year is a priority. What is "Linux" in this context? Are they talking about doing actual kernel development or clicking around Gnome and using the GCC stack?

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
I assume they mean the typical Linux userland stack.

davidmr 14y ago

> But 85 percent said finding Linux talent is difficult. I couldn't agree more with this statement. I work in Chicago--which you think would have a rather large pool of Linux talent--but it's incredibly hard to find really top-notch Linux people at any price. Like any technical job, there's no shortage of candidates that have "Linux System Administrator" on their CVs, but five minutes into a phone screen you can tell that nearly all of them are what I like to call "application drivers". They've been paid well to sit in front of an application GUI (vmware, backups, storage, etc.) for 10 years and push buttons. It's astounding to me that it's so hard to find people who can do the most basic things: build packages in the OS native format from source; write complicated shell scripts; write complicated applications in (python|perl|ruby); debug and port C/C++ programs; etc. In my last job (Dept. of Energy lab), I used to think it was hard to find people because the pay wasn't good enough, but in my current gig in the financial industry, we're willing to pay basically whatever it takes to get the best talent, but the pool of great candidates is very, very small. I think part of it is that in a shaky economy, the best people don't get laid off and they're hunkering down, unwilling to risk taking a new job, but I don't really know.

waynemr 14y ago
If they have all of that money for hiring qualified Linux talent, but they are unable to find it readily... why don't they start an apprenticeship style program? I know in the highly regulated nuclear operator field, companies setup schools, where students are paid to attend classes and if they can get their license, they have a paid position waiting. Why not something similar for Linux professionals? I have been in IT for nearly 20 years and it is downright shameful how companies these days are willing to claim they will pay whatever it takes to get IT talent that doesn't actually exist, but would rather shoot themselves in the face before investing in training.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  They will pay whatever it takes* to get IT talent that does actually exist, at other companies.
- droithomme 14y ago

jamesmcn 14y ago

This seems like a consequence of the rise of cloud computing. My experience is probably biased by the fact that I've been working in the Seattle area for most of the last decade. I've worked with and hired excellent engineers with Linux backgrounds and also Windows backgrounds. Elsewhere it may be harder to find top Windows devs. In the '90s, developers built their own Linux desktops and servers because there wasn't any IT infrastructure capable of supporting us. After the dot com crash and the nearly simultaneous death of big-iron Unix, Linux IT support started to become a thing. Medium and large companies staffed up on Linux sysadmins and support staff, so it was possible for devs to just code and remain fairly ignorant of the underlying OS - or at least confine their knowledge to the theoretical domain. Now that you can just spin up server resources in the cloud, I can see devs with Linux experience having an edge over those without.

stock_toaster 14y ago
> This seems like a consequence of the rise of cloud computing Could also be due to the rise of 'devops'. I see a fair number of places simply choosing to not hire (some I imagine may be having trouble hiring too) enough sysadmin staff, and instead just having developers do double duty and calling it 'devops'.

daniel_solano 14y ago

I wonder if it would make sense for companies looking for Linux talent to somehow target users of less 'user-friendly' distributions such as Gentoo or Arch. I don't know how well it would work, but I imagine that advertising on a project web page or, if allowed, making an announcement to a user's mailing list could be a way to find developers.

zheng 14y ago

This article is very ambiguous on what kind of linux talent they see as being needed. Are they looking for sysadmins or developers? By linux do they mean using tools like gcc, make, etc? Or do they mean writing tools against a POSIX interface? Also, considering that basically every college uses a linux environment, I find it odd that they can't find devs who can work in linux.

anon987 14y ago
I believe it's both. Linux continues to grow so organizations need more admins to support more servers as well as more developers to write applications, scripts, and programs that run on those servers. I don't see a glut of talent in either case.